Month: May 2020

One of my writing buddies had a rant last week when she was due to submit an assignment. Why the hell am I putting myself through this? She lamented. Who cares about my story? What difference does it make if I write this story? Or any story for that matter? I am such a crappy writer anyway.

I could feel her pain. I have asked myself the same questions a number of times. So many times I wanted to give writing up. Writing is an ordeal even for experienced and bestselling writers. New writers have very little chance of making a name for themselves, let alone earn an income from it.

What if we give up writing.

Sure the world will not come to standstill. No one will miss us because we haven’t been ‘discovered’ yet. Hardly anyone reads our blog articles and our short stories and novels are still buried in our computers. If we stop writing now the world will be spared of the rubbish we create and we will be spared the daily agony and can get on with our lives just like ‘normal’ people.

Except for one thing.

We will never find out what would have happened had we stuck with it.

The problem with giving up is that it is such a knee-jerk response. It is our first instinct when things get difficult. Our physiological mechanism to protect us from danger and undue hardship.

We tend to forget that, even at a time of grave danger, our inbuilt physiology gives us three choices — freeze, flee, or fight. Most of the time we choose to freeze (inaction) or flee (run away).

We rarely opt for the fight. It is because we tend to think the enemy is too big and too strong and the best chance we have of survival is to flee from it.

What happens when people stick it out.

Have a read of these three stories.

1. Carl Friedrich Gauss was born in Germany to poor, working-class parents. He didn’t know his birthday. His mother was illiterate and never recorded the date of his birth, remembering only that he had been born on a Wednesday, eight days before the Feast of the Ascension (which occurs 39 days after Easter). 

So strong was his obsession with finding his birthdate that it led young Gauss to derive methods to compute the date of Easter, both past and future years. He eventually was able to figure out that he was born on 30 April 1977. His obsession led Carl Friedrich Gauss to become one of the most outstanding mathematicians of all time.

2. James Hutton got interested in meteorology and geology many years after successfully taking a degree as Doctor of Medicine and working as a physician, introducing experimental agriculture in his own farmland and establishing profitable chemical manufacturing business. He devoted 25 years of his later life “studying the surface of the earth, and was looking with anxious curiosity into every pit or ditch or bed of a river that fell in his way,” developing the theory that geological features were not static but underwent a perpetual transformation over long periods of time. James Hutton is now known as the father of geology.

3. When Claude Hopkins came into advertising, the advertising was a haphazard way of creating awareness for products and depended more on chance and exposure to sell rather than proven and scientific methods. He took disorganized marketing and added core principles to it.

What do all these men have in common?

They followed their obsession. 

One of the common themes that most smart people have is “sticking with it”.

When you stick with a problem, you learn to solve it. Slowly and slowly you start getting better at it. Your learning accumulates and you start gaining confidence.

When I started my blog two years ago I couldn’t write even a few paragraphs. I agonized over them for hours. I wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote. It was taking me 7–8 hours to write 700–800 words articles. I would work till midnight to write while fully aware no one was reading what I was writing.

I thought it will get easier in three months, or six months or even a year. But it didn’t.

Then at some point late last year, I realized I am writing 1200 to 1500 words articles and I am doing them in much less time than before.

I had devised several little ways to improve my productivity.

I had discovered to break the writing process into small steps and to spread them over several days. I learned to do my research beforehand and save it in such a way so that I could easily retrieve it. I became regular, writing two articles each week.

At some point, the penny always drops.

t’s almost like one of those slot machines. It seems like you’re not getting anywhere in a hurry and then suddenly you have this gush of coins. But unlike a slot machine that mostly works against you, ‘sticking it out’ is almost predictable in its reward system. Stay with something for about a couple of hours every day, find a system to learn, and suddenly you will nail it.

Rather than stop writing why not do the opposite and “write a lot”.

You will be pretty hopeless in the first six months. And you’ll be just about average for at least a few years. Which isn’t to say that you will not get better. It’s just to say that you’re quite far away from where you want to be.

However, you are getting better in a small incremental way. So small that you don’t even notice it. Then one day, someone raves about the article you wrote, or poem you composed or the story you published.

And voila! your confidence soars. You realize you are not that bad after all.

Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash

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I shouldn’t have left article writing to the last hour of the day. Every time I do that I regret it. I was tired, struggling to concentrate and writing was the last thing my brain wanted to do. I waited all day for this peace and quiet, finished all the household chores, to write this article, and here I was, just wanting to curl up in the bed with a book.

I was not sleepy. In fact, I stayed up for another two hours watching a movie.

I am a night owl. I am supposed to work best at nights.

Yet my brain was categorically saying no to writing.

Why was it so?

I can do editing, diary, and journal writing at night but when it comes to writing fresh content I struggle.

Is there another factor in play other than the time of the day?

Apparently there is and it is called energy.

In psychology, energy is defined as an ability or willingness to engage in cognitive work. Just like physical work needs an optimum energy level, so does mental work. Our Brain needs a lot of fuel (oxygen and glucose) to carry out the mental work. And when these fuel levels get depleted we experience mental fatigue.

The most common symptoms of mental fatigue include mental block, lack of motivation, irritability, and stress eating.

For many people the energy levels are at their peak in the mornings. As they go through the day they steadily burn energy stores as they tackle various tasks. Even mindless tasks consume energy.

Others might experience peaks at mid-mornings, afternoons, evenings, or even at midnight.

Night owl might be able to stay awake late at night but they will only be able to tackle high energy tasks only if their energy is also at the peak at the night time.

We don’t need to practice time management, we need to learn energy management.

Not every hour of the day is same in terms of energy level. Basically we have three energy levels – peak, middle and low.

All those tasks that require high energy input should be done when our energy levels are at their peak. So some of us it first thing in the morning for others it is in the middle of the afternoon.

Writing is high energy-consuming activity. Leaving it for the time when my energy levels were low was the reason I was feeling blocked. The next morning I was able to finish the article within half an hour.

When is our energy level at its peak?

Scientist says it is it’s roughly 2-4 hours after we wake up. Our brain has gone through all the previous day’s information and filed it appropriately. It has plenty of fuel (oxygen and glucose )and it is ready to do the work that requires lots of concentration.

That is the reason most of the writers write in the morning. Maria Popova of Brain Pickings created an interesting visualization depicting the correlation between wake-up times, literary productivity and major awards of 37 writers whose wake-up times were available.

Mason Curry studied the daily rituals of writers for years and wrote about it in his blog. Eventually, he published a book Daily Rituals, in which he has presented the routines and working habits of 161 creative minds, among them – novelists, poets, playwrights, composers, painters, philosophers, and scientists. It is packed with anecdotes about getting up super early, staying up super late, drinking heroic amounts of coffee, taking precisely timed naps and long daily walks, and much more.

So what time of the day is best for writing?

When your energy levels are at their peak. And it is different for different people. Usually, it is 2-4 hours after you wake up.

Create a schedule to maximize those hours and make sure not to waste them on the tasks that can be done when middle or low energy levels.

Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash

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When Steve Jobs said, ‘Don’t do something better, do it differently,’ he changed the corporate world forever. He not only said that but he demonstrated too. When everyone was coming up with several models of personal computers, he brought just one. When everyone was competing on price, he concentrated on design. People queued for miles at every iPhone release even when they were and are the most expensive phone in the market.

He changed the rules.

He didn’t try to be better than his competition; instead, he concentrated on being different by focusing on different things.

I wondered if the same rule can be used in the ‘creative sector.’ Can a writer write differently? Can a painter paint in a different way? Can a singer sing in a completely different way.

As soon as I started asking these questions the answer stared at my face.

Of course, they can.

That is the only way the creative people thrive, by doing things differently.

The creativity doesn’t come with competition, but with imagination.

There is always going to be someone smarter than you, but there may not be someone who is more imaginative.” -Byron Wien

Yet we spend our lives in order to become better than others. We berate ourselves for not being able to write like the writers we admire. We scold our efforts, criticize our own work, and give up in desperation because we think we are not good enough.

Frank Kafka was an exceptional writer, his work expressed the absurdity of modern society in a unique way, yet plagued by self-doubt he asked his friend, Max Brod, to destroy all of his manuscripts after his death. Thanks to his friend’s foresight, who preserved his work by publishing it, there is a whole cult of admirers appropriately named “Kafkaesque.”

Kafka didn’t realize in his life that he had the advantage of being different. Something he instinctively had by being himself. He was a physically week child of a dominating father. He suffered the impersonal nature of bureaucracy and capitalism first hand to win the admiration of his father but ended up mocking the world devoid of meaning or purpose. There lied his uniqueness.

What Kafka had defiantly, Malcolm Gladwell cultivated. He wrote sociology, psychology, and social psychology books like thrillers. No doubt he is a great writer but he knows the advantage of being different.

Now the question is how to be different.

The answer is not what you expect.

Here is a story that illustrates it best.

Mohamed Ali, was a great athlete. A heavyweight champion, holder of several records for close to four decades and topper of many rankings by Sports Illustrated and the BBC. But the real reason Ali occupies such a unique place in people’s hearts and minds is that he created his own category — he was the original social-activist athlete.

Ali wasn’t afraid to use his voice at a time when others in his position usually deferred to their managers.

Ali was the first athlete to take a very public stand for civil rights and social justice — refusing to be drafted into the U.S. military in the mid-1960s, citing both his religion (he converted to Islam) and his objection to the Vietnam War.

Ali’s status as champion kept him — and these issues — in the spotlight during the five years he fought his draft conviction, eventually winning an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971.

Even though he was stripped of his titles and banned from the sport he loved during the prolonged legal battle, Ali was often dead center in the ring of public opinion, for good and for bad. His return to the ring was relatively seamless as a result. That’s why Ali transcended boxing and became a category king, the person to whom all other “combat athletes” are compared.

by Christopher Lochhead and Heather Clancy

Ali was not only different but a whole league in himself.

And he was able to achieve that status because he was always himself. He never had a shred of doubt of his own talent or believes.

And that is the essence of being different.

Each one is already unique, yet we strive to be like someone else.

All we need is to have the courage to be ourselves and we will discover we stand out anyway.

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

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